in the 70s, 1976, the treasury put out a tax reform proposal at the end of the ford administration. there were two model income taxes and a consumption tax, but the author of the study, who was the deputy assistant secretary then, david bradford, was basically pushing the consumption tax idea, and this book blue prints for basic tax reform, was a very influential book, and the proposal got a lot of attention, and that was basically an individual tax. it would all be collected at the individual level with a deduction for savings. by the way, in case you think only economists favored that, a big infliens on that was a harvard professor in favor of the income tax. this resummaried later in a proposal by senators in the 1990s called the usa tax, universal savings accounts, which my colleague helped to design that. i second idea that was very popular with the so-called flat tax that was a book originally published in 197 # 2 coming from "capitalism and freedom," a chapter on the ideal income tax, and the ideal income tax he describes is actually the flat tax, which is consumption tax. t
